Global Warming

The problem with having to endure such an extended summer is that you have to endure even more unbearable people who never fail to remind you that this is such an extended, unbearable summer.

When God created human beings and lawyers and journalists, He had the foresight to fit in most of us many advanced features like the much-needed ability to believe that the discounts the various shops offer these days are acceptable or even genuine. If there aren’t people out there who don’t get aroused by offers like —- ‘when you buy 25 shirts, the next 25 shirts that you don’t buy will not be charged to you’ —- then society will be a much poorer place to live in.

Anyway, God, even while providing this faculty, slipped badly by hard-wiring into us human beings, the quality of stating the very obvious repeatedly. Anyway, God, even while providing this faculty, slipped badly by hard-wiring into us human beings, the quality of stating the very obvious repeatedly.

If you are wiping the sweat-beads off your brows and finding the weather discomfortingly blazing, you will still have well-meaning people walking up to you in elevators, in train stations, in airports, in restrooms, in dreams, to helpfully bring to your notice that the weather is sweaty and discomfortingly blazing.

On such occasions, the apt response from you has to be to brilliantly point out: ‘Yes, the weather is sweaty and discomfortingly blazing.’ And this works like no MLM scheme has worked before, and soon the whole world is talking about how the weather is sweaty and discomfortingly blazing. This will eventually lead every one to bring up the subject of global warming.

But come to think of it, these days it doesn’t take much to bring up the topic of global warming. See, I just now did. Yes, the theme of this week’s column indeed is: global warming.

To further illustrate my point, consider the following conversations, which I can vouch for since I personally made them all up.

Scenario I

First Person: Shall we have some pav bhaji?

Second Person: No, thanks. I’ll have pani puri. No need to heat it up. Global warming you see.

Scenario II

Tamil film artists: Media in Tamilnadu is irresponsible. Rather than prying into our personal lives and bedroom peccadilloes they should be writing about global warming.

Media in Tamilnadu: What’s global warming?

Scenario III

You: Global warming.

Friend: Yes, global warming.

Scenario IV

You: It’s too much to demand Rs 100 for just bargaining with you without even travelling in your vehicle.

Auto driver: Do I need to bring up global warming into this?

All these examples unquestionably point out to the fact that all conversations involve at least two persons.

Ha, ha, as usual I’m just joshing. The point is global warming is worrying every one into distraction. Why is it so?

Global warming is different from say, the Y2k problem, which had the good sense to solve itself. Y2K, to rejig your memory, came about because somebody wrote the year 2000 as Y2K, and no computer could naturally figure out how anyone can spell the year 2000 as Y2K as K has no real meaning in any language. Eventually the whole issue was sorted out by the creative expedience of moving on to the next year.

To grapple the true import of global warming, we have to figure out greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprint, depletion of ozone layer and many others probably including the GDP of Burkina Faso. But there is a scientific way to surmount these big-sounding technical jargon and trendy terms: Ignore them. This works miraculously.

But even if you are to cast aside carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions, what about Kyoto protocol? Whenever the two words ‘Kyoto’, ‘protocol’ is uttered together the normal reaction of any sensible human being could only be, ‘huh’. Anyway, if you are interested to know, Kyoto is a city in Japan where most of the countries in the world met (in 1997) to arrive at a solution to the problem of global warming, and all the nations after intense brainstorming, and all the scientists using all their knowledge and experience, managed to hammer out the important conclusion: Yes, there is a dire need to arrive at a solution to the problem of global warming. This is now the official document that forms the pivotal basis for all world discussions to find a solution to the problem of global warming.

A couple of years ago the nations of the world met at Copenhagen, where they took the global warming discussion further through a consensus that there was an urgent need to find a solution to the global warming crisis facing the world. In the face of such concerted onslaught, global warming will one day have to, by itself, surrender completely.

However, the most practical method by which you as an ordinary, every-day citizen can tackle the global warming is to grow plenty of plants and grass in your own house.

The thing is it works big time: When you have grass and plants in your house, naturally insects and even snakes make a beeline to them. If snakes and dangerous insects populating your place don’t take your mind off global warming, I don’t know what will.